The plight of refugees in the Balkans
By Katja Ridderbusch
BERLIN (DPA): The misery has to be grave when Albanian civilians take flight to Kosovo, where Serbian military troops left their dark trail two years ago, expelling hundreds of thousands of Albanians, torturing and murdering them, and burning their villages to the ground.
The pictures are indelibly engraved in the collective memory of how they fled then, into the forests and the mountains across the borders to Macedonia. Today, they are fleeing again -- in the opposite direction -- out of Macedonia, out of that same country that for so long bore the reputation of being a haven of humanity and reason in the Balkans.
History has now reversed itself and repeated itself at the same time in a gruesome, bitter manner, not only in the Balkans but also in the West. The battle between Macedonian government troops and Albanian rebels in the north has become a positional war. Hectic diplomatic activity has started in the West, the pattern of which is as familiar as its actors: warnings, threats, demands and enticements are being issued but in the final analysis only helplessness remains.
The European Union's envoy for foreign and security policy, Javier Solana, who was Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during the Kosovo war, traveled to Skopje several times for talks with the all-party government. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer thundered like a prophet of doom that Macedonia was in danger of splintering. Its territorial integrity, and with it the stability of the entire region, was threatened, he said.
Efforts by Robert Frowick, special negotiator of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), to seat the Albanian parties in Macedonia at the negotiating table encountered hysterical protests both in Skopje and the West after they had agreed to support the government against the rebels.
The only real holder of authority in the region -- naturally an authority based purely on arms -- is the United States. Washington has played its cards close to its chest so far and wants to cut back its military engagement in the Balkans anyway.
Just a few months ago, there was every indication that with the October revolution in Belgrade last year, when dictator Slobodan Milosevic was deposed, the vicious circle of Balkan terror had closed, finally. But the war has returned, namely, in that country that completed its transition to independence without bloodshed in 1991 and which seemed so close to the West that it sided with NATO during the Kosovo war.
But the peace in Macedonia was deceptive. Now violence has broken out with a 10-year delay. Many of the causes were foreseeable, perhaps it was only a case of the West seeing Macedonia in a too rosy light. The Albanian minority, officially put at close to 25 percent of the population -- other estimates assume 30 percent -- has never been integrated politically, economically, or socially, in contrast to the official claims from Skopje. Albanian parties were involved in all of the post- independence governments but this involvement was more of a window-dressing nature.
With the breakup of the old governing coalition and with the departure of the former ambassador to Germany, Foreign Minister Srgjan Kerim, Skopje severed its link to the West and allowed its last cosmopolitan mediator to take his leave. A helpless search ensued both in the Balkans and in the West for who was to blame for the allegedly surprising Macedonian disaster -- for the root of all evil, in other words -- and the culprit was found quickly: NATO and its Operation Allied Force of 1999.
NATO was said to have protected the wrong parties and also to have bombed the wrong ones. This position ignores the fact that the Albanian problem in Macedonia is home grown, in the main, and not imported from Kosovo.
The Balkan demons seem to be befalling one country after another with an almost inevitable regularity. No country, it seems, is spared the bloody fate, and the hands of the West are tied. Now it is Macedonia's turn and further potential battlefields are waiting patiently in the wings -- Vojvodina, the province in northern Serbia populated mostly by Hungarians, Sandzak in the south with its Muslim population, and even Slovenia, the most progressive of all the republics of former Yugoslavia. In the Balkans, all things are possible.